Julian Cassander Work was born September 25, 1910 in Nashville, Tennessee to a family of professional musicians. His grandfather, John Wesley Work (1848–1923) was a composer and arranger for the Fisk Jubilee Singers; his father, John Wesley Work Jr. (1871–1925) was a noted collector of folk songs, choral director, educator and songwriter; his brother, John Wesley Work III (1901–1967) was a composer, musicologist and scholar of African-American folklore and music; and his mother, Agnes Hayes Work, was a singer who also helped to train the Fisk Jubilee Singers.
During his pre-college years in Nashville, Work was involved in music, participated in neighborhood musical groups and performed as a jazz pianist. He enrolled as a sociology major at Fisk University, where his brother John Wesley Work III was professor of music, but his keen interest in music eventually led him to pursue a degree in composition, as a student of his brother. Upon completion of his studies at Fisk, Work moved to New York City where he pursued a career as a pianist and served as a composer and arranger for various radio, television and recording companies, one of the earliest African-American composers in the industry. He served as a staff arranger for CBS Radio and was also the sole arranger for the NBC radio show, The Voice of Firestone, a popular classical music variety show that aired on NBC from 1928 to 1954, and then on ABC from 1957 to 1963. Upon his retirement, he moved to Tolland, Massachusetts, where he died June 15, 1995.
Work composed a number of original works for concert band. When asked about his attraction to the band as a medium of musical expression, he stated, “This was an opening that came to me and provided me an opportunity to compose. I have always been fond of the woodwind instruments.” He admitted that he has been influenced by the music of Debussy and Ravel. However, he hastened to add, “I am not wholly an impressionist, for I hope that I have developed my own style of orchestration, fitting that orchestration to a more lyric style of composition.”
Autumn Walk is a miniature tone poem that reverberates Work’s compositional style, imbued with rich tonal harmonies, lyrical melodic ideas and sensitive orchestrations that radiate with imaginative tone color. It was composed in 1958, and was a notable addition among the repertoire recorded by Frederick Fennell and the Eastman Wind Ensemble for the American Concert Band Masterpieces album in 1959 (Mercury Records MG-50220). Curiously however, this piece was left off subsequent pressings of that famous release.
Autumn Walk is a marvelous composition in its own right, but listening to the 1959 EWE recording, one notices a remarkable difference from the published score, including additional passages that sound organically conceived. In his discography of Fennell’s recordings titled Ffortissimo, Roger Rickson simply noted the work was recorded with “FF edits.” However, it has been recently revealed that it was Donald Hunsberger, then a graduate student and member of the EWE, who was responsible for adding the enhancements heard on the EWE recording. Shortly before his death in November 2023, Hunsberger stated, “FF and I were discussing the piece after a rehearsal (I did a lot of rehearsing for him that year as he was away doing President of CBDNA) concerning some of the thinness of sound... I had just spent four years with the Marine Band in Washington, playing trombone and serving as resident arranger. I had been trying to upgrade the band's sound, experimenting with all kinds of orchestration, and told FF that I would work over the score and enrich it in various ways.”
This edition incorporates additional passages conceived by Donald Hunsberger and various revisions and modifications in orchestrational aspects, with careful thought to maintain the integrity of the original composition.
– R. Anderson Collinsworth